Old Sol: With this procedure I’ll be going through I need some quiet time. I don’t need any unexpected emotional upheavals nor any drama to add to the stress. I’m depending on my Chosen People to keep things settled down. You don’t have anything in the works to rattle things do you?

Me: I don’t think so. The Japanese seem to have the Pacific Ocean fairly well taken care of so you won’t have to concern yourself with it much longer. I suppose Israel might nuke someone and get itself wiped off the map, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. They’ve been working on that fifty years.

Old Sol: I swear! Things were calm in the Middle East for almost a thousand years. Then you people and the British had to play God. Moved those people back there and I haven’t heard about anything but trouble there for half a century.

Me: Just trying to do what was right.

Old Sol: What was right? If I wanted those people living there making trouble I’d never have allowed the Romans to run them off. If you wanted to give them a homeland why there, where they were sure to make trouble? Why not Puerto Rico? You OWNED that. Water on all sides. Nobody to piss off except the people already there.

Me: They didn’t want Puerto Rico. They thought you wanted them where they used to be.

Old Sol: Why would they think that? I haven’t even hinted they’re Chosen People since a long time before the Romans ran them out. If they want to be Chosen People they need to be in the US or a US territory. Give them Puerto Rico. They’ll be part of the Chosen People again. Part of the United States. And the only borders they can violate will be salt water. End of problem.

Me: But what about the Puerto Ricans? They think they already own the place.

Old Sol: Send them to Texas. Put them to work in all those new oil fields I just gave you. No trouble. Those Zionists will have a homeland and get to be part of the Chosen People again, and the Puerto Ricans will have jobs. Besides, I always intended Texas to be mostly for Mexicans. Puerto Ricans are mostly Mexicans.

After the post a few days ago about the meaning of life I found myself pondering a number of things about how most of humanity relates to the subject. The great majority of folks in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world believe they know how to get by with doing some heavy-duty ugly during this lifetime and still end up somewhere good. Assuming they tip their hats regularly to a diety carefully tailored to forgive them their breadcrumb sins. It’s the hat-tipping, after all, that’s important.

On the other hand, that same body of humanity’s prone to take a lot of satisfaction knowing the people who didn’t tip their hats right have a tough row to hoe. Many engage in firefights of advance “I told you so!” insofar as how bad those who didn’t believe them are going to wish they did.

It’s not something I need worry myself about, but sometimes my mind drifts there anyway, imagining what it would be like in an Eternity surrounded by the sort of people who spent their lives absorbed in hat-tipping with one hand, and selling used cars with the other.

I’ve encountered this other places, but the first time was several years ago from the man in the picture.

Dean Kindsvater. Deano. A man who never saw $50,000 free and clear in his sixty-four years of life. He played the lottery, but he’d scoff when the prizes weren’t in the high millions. He’d buy tickets for the big jackpots and wouldn’t even check them if nobody won. “Hell,” he’d say, “those small prizes aren’t even worth the trouble!”

Here’s a guy, never finished high school, left home in his low-teen years, bounced around as a dish washer and short-order cook for years. Finally got into the HeeChee jewelry manufacturing business in the early `70s. Bought an old railroad hotel in Belen, NM, ran a team of illegal aliens out of the top floor until someone discovered Heechee could be made cheaper in Southeast Asia.

Deano rode through, living in one room of the bottom floor of that hotel the remainder of his life. Windows all boarded up, top floor a vacant ruin of pigeon droppings and the debris of the life of the man. He opened a junk shop and sold odds and ends and made up the difference moving a little jade on the side. Lived downstairs with a propane bottle for heat, extension cords running all over the place from the one outlet, keeping the TV going, the microwave oven for coffee, refrigerator for TV dinners. Cold water sink to wash his utensils.

Three mongrel dogs living there with him.

The only book Dean ever read in his entire life convinced him he could make a living playing Blackjack, which he couldn’t. Visiting him in that hotel the first time, knocking on that door, hearing him coming from the interior coughing, reminded me of a Frankenstein movie, him as Igor.

I was with him once when someone asked him what religion he was. “Christian.”…. “No… I mean what denomination? Catholic? Baptist?”

Deano thought about it before he answered. “Catholic.” But the conversation afterward suggested Deano didn’t know the difference between a Catholic and a Baptist. He’d never stopped to think about it. To him those churches he never went into were all alike, all the same bunch of folks. Never entered his mind that it might be something worth thinking about. Never been in a church in 64 years of life, never paused to wonder anything at all about anything at all, so far as I could tell. A unique man.

But Deano thought the prizes too small to bother with if the jackpot was just $10 million. Never even bothered to check if he’d won the $100K someone had a ticket for in NM, but had never claimed. He had, in common with a lot of other people, that scorn for the smaller prizes that could have changed his life. He’d probably be shyly flattered, knowing his picture was up here for strangers to see. Flattered and a little suspicious. “How’s this going to make anyone any money?” he’d ask the universe.

Welcome

I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.